Step 6 - Transport

Fast delivery.
Smaller environmental impact.

When selecting your print partner, you want to know that your job will be delivered on time, arrive in good order, be at the best possible cost, and deliver with the least impact to the environment.

At Acorn we manage over 15,000 deliveries each year and our rate of successful ‘on time’ delivery is 98.9%. To ensure we are both keeping costs low and the efficiency high for our customers we use a combination of different suppliers depending on the load size, frequency, and individual access and unloading requirements.

Learn more about our facilities

Reducing drive time & optimising routes

Where smaller single title deliveries are needed, we use pallet network services, this is where usually up to 8 pallets maximum are collected, taken to a central hub, and then grouped with other consignments to provide the most efficient routing of delivery.

Additionally, as a printer of over 330 magazine titles, we have many titles, delivering to similar destinations at similar times. So, where Acorn can identify these needs which could be to a widely used mailing house or a major newstrade distributor like Menzies. In this scenario Acorn’s own transport management team will co-load the titles, maximise the number of pallets, and use the fewest number of vehicles on the road.

Explore our previous titles

Using network carriers to minimise carbon output and maxmise effiency

Order printed & packed using eco-friendly products

Pallets prepared for collection

Collection by pallet network carrier

Route planned to ensure environmental efficiency

Efficient final delivery

Environmentally
conscious deliveries

See our facilities

With similar targets in mind, in 2024 we worked on a new investment project alongside our approved paper waste management supplier. This was to identify how we could cut the number of daily paper waste collections and remove a significant number of HGV miles on the road. We installed a new intuitive paper waste compactor which allowed us to directly communicate with the supplier and only organising a collection when the compactor was truly full. This reduced the number of daily collections per week from average 5 to 3, thus removing 10,000 HGV miles from the road and 20,000kg CO2 eq.

Selecting partners with a shared sustainability ethos

Just like printing, road haulage is an energy intensive business, so when Acorn is selecting its preferred partners, it looks beyond just competitive pricing but a shared ethos when it comes to sustainability. Some of the key attributes we look for are:

Modern,
well-maintained fleet